In this approach, user organisations will use GS1 2D barcodes on the Logistic Label.

All data elements encoded have to comply with the current rules for the GS1 barcodes.
One of those rules is that user organisations must use the GS1 element string rules and then encode the information in the GS1 2D barcode.

As explained in section 10, GS1 Application Identifiers 4300-4306, 4310-4316 and 4320 support non-Latin characters within their values provided that these are encoded using percent-encoding.

Many programming languages provide built-in functions for percent-encoding and percent-decoding, as indicated in the table below:

RFC 3986 defines how Percent Encoding can be used to represent non-Latin characters within URIs. Each non-Latin character is first converted to UTF-8 and then encoded using percent encoding, where each byte is expressed as a literal percent symbol followed by two hexadecimal characters. RFC 3629 defines UTF-8.

Example:
“Café Niçoise” would be encoded as
Caf%C3%A9+Ni%C3%A7oise

Although space characters frequently appear within address information, the 82-character invariant subset of ISO/IEC 646 (GS1 GENSPEC Figure 7.11-1) does not include the space character.

Many of the data elements that the S4T approach created new AI for, will contain characters that cannot be included in the Scan4Transport barcode as-is.

Common examples of such characters are “space” and so-called non-Latin characters such as ä, Ü, ñ, Ô, ç and entire languages (e.g., Korean, Thai, Chinese).

All of the address examples in the previous chapter included “space” characters.

One of the French address examples above included ô (21 Rue des Entrepôts

GS1 Japan

Place Canada, 7-3-37 Akasaka, Minato-ku,

Tokyo JAPAN 107-0052,

Address formats vary widely from country to country. Local conventions for writing are different e.g., some countries will generally write the house number before the street name whereas in other countries people will always write the house number after the street name. Many more local variations related to other data elements that make up an address exist.

When implementing Scan4Transport, user organisations use the GS1 2D barcodes (GS1 DataMatrix and GS1 QR code). Data elements encoded within these barcodes must comply with the current rules for GS1 barcodes.

To ensure global use of Scan4Transport, Non-Latin characters and a space character may be included in the barcode using the percent encoding approach described in section 10. These “special characters” are characters that are not included in the character set allowed for the specific type of barcode.